Efficacy and Safety of Metformin for Obesity: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: The efficacy and safety of metformin for obesity in children and adolescents remains unclear. OBJECTIVE: To assess the efficacy and safety of metformin via systematic review. DATA SOURCES: Data sources included PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, Scopus, and ClincalTrials.gov (inception to November 2019). STUDY SELECTION: We selected randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in which researchers assessed the efficacy and safety of metformin with lifestyle interventions, compared with a placebo with lifestyle interventions, in children and adolescents with obesity. DATA EXTRACTION: Two researchers independently extracted data and assessed quality. The primary outcomes were mean changes from baseline in BMI, BMI z score, homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance, and gastrointestinal adverse effects. RESULTS: Twenty-four RCTs (1623 patients; range: 16 to 151) were included. Ages ranged from 4 to 19 years, and follow-up ranged from 2 months to 2 years. Metformin resulted in a modest decrease in BMI (range of mean values: −2.70 to 1.30 vs −1.12 to 1.90), BMI z score (range of mean values: −0.37 to −0.03 vs −0.22 to 0.15), and homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (range of mean values: −3.74 to 1.00 vs −1.40 to 2.66). Metformin resulted in a higher frequency of gastrointestinal adverse effects (range: 2% to 74% vs 0% to 42%). LIMITATIONS: The available evidence is of varying quality, with high heterogeneity between trials, suggesting some uncertainty in the benefits of metformin in this population. CONCLUSIONS: With this systematic review of RCTs, we suggest that metformin has modest but favorable effects on weight and insulin resistance and a tolerable safety profile among children and adolescents with obesity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".